Imagine: a violent John Lennon

Playing it by the book: Cynthia Lennon with copies of John
in London this week.Photo: Reuters

AS CYNTHIA Lennon opened her sunroom door one day early in 1968,
she felt a frisson of fear. When her eyes adjusted to the dark, she
saw her husband, John, and Yoko Ono sitting cross-legged, facing
each other, on the floor.

"They were wearing the towelling robes we kept in the pool
house, so I imagined they had been for a swim," Mrs Lennon writes.
"John looked at me, expressionless, and said: 'Oh, hi.' Yoko didn't
turn around."

Confronted for the first time by the sight of her husband and
his lover, "rooted to the spot in shock and pain", and with Yoko
wearing her dressing gown, Mrs Lennon blurted out an invitation to
dinner. "John said, indifferently: 'No, thanks.' "

And so one of the more famous infidelities of the 1960s was
discovered. Cynthia Lennon tells the story in her book,
John, published this week. Extracts from the book will
appear in The Age's Good Weekend magazine on Saturday.

Although she wrote a memoir in 1978, the first Mrs Lennon has
kept quiet since John was murdered in December 1980  and she
was prevented by Yoko, she writes, from attending the funeral. Now
she has published a far more detailed portrait of her first
husband, and it is not always pretty. The book tells how a
"passionately jealous" Lennon hit her during the early days of
their romance after she danced with his friend and one-time Beatles
bass guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe.

"He could turn on me in an instant, belittling or berating me,
shooting accusations, cutting remarks or acid wisecracks at me,
that left me hurt, frustrated and in tears," she writes.

Lennon emerges as a deeply insecure young man, who combined
periods of cruelty to Mrs Lennon with outbursts of passion and
constant anxiety that she demonstrate her love for him. It was a
personality poorly equipped to face the madness of Beatlemania.

But Mrs Lennon also writes of Lennon's "decency", remembering
how he opposed manager Brian Epstein's decision to hide the Lennon
marriage from the public because he thought it would hurt the new
band's standing with their armies of female fans.

The book  which is sad but never mean-spirited  is
accompanied by a foreword written by the son she had with John,
Julian, who describes his father as a remarkable man who "stood for
peace and love in the world" but "found it very hard to show any
peace and love to his first family  my mother and me".

Mrs Lennon said she wrote the book because "if people want to
know the truth about the legend then I think they should learn
about the bits that are missing from the picture. They should be
able to see everything, warts and all," she told Scottish newspaper
The Herald this week.